Abstract
This chapter discusses the literature on national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding the societal and political dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitates intellectual engagement from disciplines beyond the health sciences and medicine. As fundamentally devastating as this pandemic has been, the universal character of this complex and multifaceted policy problem constitutes a natural experiment, a fruitful empirical field for research with the aim to understand and explain the variation of national responses to the pandemic. Divergence of varying degree was also observed in within-country, albeit federal, contexts. In the United States, the response to the pandemic was left entirely to the states. An analysis by Capano et al. finds that the diversity of responses concerns not only the kinds of policy instruments or the combination of instruments different countries used but also differences in the timing, sequence, and speed of adoption of measures as well as the stringency of these measures.